White Paper: Elements Of Transcoding Performance

The task of reaching audiences whenever and wherever they are has escalated in importance and complexity in today's highly connected, information- and entertainment-driven world. For media and entertainment companies to stay competitive, it's essential that they be able to distribute information and entertainment across a constantly growing number of delivery platforms as quickly as possible.

But in looking at content creation and delivery pipelines for media capture, ingest, post-production, encoding/transcoding and delivery, there are a number of factors that can dramatically affect the overall performance of the application components. Storage systems are key in this regard. As we move to a world dominated by stereoscopic 3D, 2K, 4K and higher resolution content, moving very large files onto editing systems, servers, archival and playout systems quickly and efficiently is essential—and the role of high-performance storage takes on even greater importance. Here, the profile of the data itself adds complexity to potential bottlenecks in the system. For example, performance can be affected by file sizes, the random or sequential nature of the data, the ratio of reads/writes being performed, even the number and nature of layers within video files. It's also not enough to move data across the network to the CPUs over the interconnects as well as to and from storage systems using automated tools and software suites that don't give operators exacting control over job optimization.